Speaking during interviews with German site Gamestar (here’s an English translation on Reddit) Multiplayer.it (translation via PST), Bethesda director Todd Howard explained a bit more about how both PvE and PvP will work in Fallout 76.
And because the developers know that these open-world survival games are a breeding ground for griefers, so they’ve made some special concessions in game design to lessen the impact of this behavior, especially on new players. One of the choices involves making low-level players PvP immune. For your first five levels, you can’t die to PvP actions. Of course the trade off is that much of the gameplay will be locked off to you in those early levels, so the incentive to level up and engage in PvP is there at all times.
Another major element of preventing toxic players from ruining Fallout 76 is the addition of a wanted system to the game.
“Let’s say someone murders somebody who didn’t want to engage in combat. That’s possible at the moment, yet very, very hard to do – maybe that will change. He gets a status as being ‘wanted’, and can’t do a lot of the things other players can do. All the other players can now see him and he gets a big bounty on his head. He becomes some sort of epic enemy, that every other player can go after.”
Other aspects of the game were expanded on over the course of the interview as well. Howard also notes that “all the quests we have designed are playable solo or in a team of four. That means there are no quests focused on PvP. We want to separate PvP and player-made challenges from the hand-made quests.”
There will also be fast travel of some sort in the game, but no specific details were given as to how it will work in-game. And with such a huge game world, I’d expect this to be a necessity. Although I have to wonder exactly what kinds of protection against abuse of the system will be built into Fallout 76.
While these additions and the wildly different gameplay style will turn some more hardcore Fallout fans off of the game, the team hopes to cash in on the interest of a much more varied fanbase. We’ll just have to wait and see how the grand vision of Fallout 76 pans out come release.
Fallout 76 is due out on PlayStation 4, PC, and Xbox One on November 16. And in case you needed to hype yourself up some more, we’ve included all the various gameplay trailers for the game down below.
